Speed comparison between Hostgator and SiteGround (Speed tests on site B – Part 1)

I set up another site for a client (Site B) on Hostgator India and then mirrored the same on SiteGround in order to see what speed I was getting at both places.

Its close run between the two, especially when taking into account the download size from SG is smaller.

One may question, why not turn on Varnish cache for HostGator and then test? But as we have seen earlier, turning it on makes no difference, and at least in that set of tests gave worse results than without!

Hostgator without Varnish cache

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Range

1.9s – 5.7s

Siteground with supercacher and CF CDN

+

Range

0.9s – 3.6s

Compression (gzip)

An interesting observation is that the download size has drastically reduced between HostGator and SiteGround. 1.6MB reduced to 1MB, just like that! Obviously there had to be an explanation. After digging around, I found that SiteGround was automatically gzipping scripts and CSS, which gave me this saving. Good stuff, SiteGround.